Phillips quizzed on commission’s disability focus

Trevor Phillips, the head of the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), was forced to defend its focus on disability issues yesterday (Sunday) at the Liberal Democrat party conference.

Mr Phillips was confronted during a fringe event on the future challenges for the EHRC, where he admitted that disability equality had not progressed as far as some other strands, especially with regard to mental health.

Disabled delegates and a disability campaigner questioned why he had primarily focused on examples of race and gender while setting the EHRC agenda, with very few mentions of disability.

When pressed afterwards by Disability Now on whether the fight for disability equality had been diluted in the EHRC, Mr Phillips said: “Some of the race and gender stakeholders say the same thing, but the real question is what is it people think we ought to be doing that we’re not?

“If people want to go around saying this, it would help if they said what more we should be doing to convince them that we’re bothered.

“Without that, it’s asking me to come and give people flannel and say, ‘Oh, I love you.’ Well nobody cares about that – they care about, ‘What are you doing, Phillips?’”

He said disability was the only equality strand to have its own committee and staff in the EHRC, though he admitted that this could be dissolved in four or five years after a review.

“Probably the single biggest case we’ve deal with is the Sarah Coleman case, which means six million carers now have access to a right they didn’t have before,” he told us.

He added that his own awareness of disability issues, as well as the whole of EHRC staff, had been heightened since the commission came into being a year ago.

He said: “I would say that the issues of workplace flexibility and human fertilisation, which are in the disability arena, are more alive in my mind as issues for the commission to attack than some of the race relations issues, which are more familiar. That would not be the case were the disability crew not part of the commission.”

*See the October issue of Disability Now for an analysis of how the disability movement views the EHRC’s first year